I’ve had good luck with gnome so far. imwheel takes care of nautilus, and here are some notes for the record:

1. nautilus audio previews need sox compiled with mad for mp3 support (the ‘mad’ USE flag on Gentoo
2. gnome’s recommendation to use mail-notification wasn’t the best, imho – gnubiff is much better. And for the record, for maildir support with gnubiff, select “file or folder”, and leave the trailing slash on your maildir directory (not the ‘cur’ folder).
3. tomboy is awesome, and is worth the mono dependency. It’s much easier to coherently take notes when you can easily interconnect them Wiki-style (even though I normally detest wikis.)
4. It may be worth keeping fvwm as a window manager with gnome rather than metacity, for the customizability of keyboard and mouse actions… I could dump the fancier modules and get back some of the shortcuts I’m used to. The downside is that my metacity theme is purty…